1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the dissemination of public announcements and, more particularly, to the rapid dissemination of urgent public announcements using client computers connected to a network, including an Internet Protocol-based network such as the Internet or a private Intranet.
2. Background Description
The Emergency Broadcast System is a well-established means for rapid dissemination of urgent public announcements by interrupting regularly scheduled programming on traditional broadcast communications media such as radio and television. Traditional broadcast communications media are well suited for the rapid dissemination of urgent public announcements because the systems employed by such media are characterized by a large number of user terminals (such as radios or television sets) in a concentrated geographic area, which are configured to receive a continuous stream of a relatively limited selection of information content (such as entertainment) from a relatively limited number of transmitters (such as local television or radio stations). In addition, the continuously streaming nature of radio and television means that program interruptions may have an immediate impact on the information content being displayed by a user terminal. Thus, a large number of persons in a given geographic area may be reached almost immediately by interrupting a relatively small amount of television or radio programming.
Increasingly, however, people are spending time using the Internet instead of listening to radio or watching television. As of October, 2004, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population regularly used the Internet, and the time devoted by average Internet user to the Internet was approximately 1.7 times as much as the time devoted by the average Internet user to watching television.
As radio and television increasingly lose audience to the Internet, communities are experiencing a decline in the number of people who can be reached at any given moment by interrupting regularly scheduled radio or television programming.
Communities are not currently able to disseminate urgent public announcements to persons while they are engaged in operating user terminals to access the Internet, unless there is a radio or television set turned on in the background. Thus, there is an unfilled need for a capability to disseminate urgent public announcements through the Internet, in addition to using conventional radio and television.
Technical differences between the Internet and conventional broadcast media have made it difficult or impossible to establish an Internet equivalent of the Emergency Broadcast System. For example, as noted, radio and television are characterized by a relatively limited number of centralized transmitters broadcasting a continuous stream of a relatively limited selection of entertainment and other information content to a relatively large number of user terminals in a relatively concentrated geographic area.
Unlike radio and television, the Internet is characterized by a relatively large number of geographically dispersed servers providing information content to a relatively small number of user terminals per server, with little or no attention paid to the users' geographic location. Such differences between the Internet and conventional radio or television have made it difficult or impossible to implement an Internet equivalent of the Emergency Broadcast System prior to the present invention.
Existing art systems for making announcements over the Internet consist of either (a) posting announcements on a web site, thus requiring a user proactively to access the web site to look for urgent announcements; (b) sending announcements by email, thus requiring users to access their email before becoming aware of an announcement requiring their attention; or (c) including announcements in an XML-based Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed, thus requiring users to install specialized RSS software on their browsers, to have the software configured to provide new feeds promptly, and to subscribe to an RSS service used to disseminate the announcement in question. Current RSS feeds use insecure communication channels.